This week in the world of document management there have been a number of upgrades and releases, including the introduction of multi-tasking for Yahoo Mail and enhanced search from dtSearch. In addition, new research shows document capture is still big business and Microsoft continued to extend the market reach of Office 365.

Changes for Yahoo Mail

It seems no matter what she does, Marissa Mayer just can’t make some people happy. This week she annoyed some Yahoo users by pushing out changes to Yahoo mail.

In reality, the changes announced on the Yahoo mail blog were badly needed. According to the post by Ratan Hudda, architect on the Yahoo mail team, Yahoo Mail now comes with a simplified way of jumping between email, search results and drafts.

This is to replace the old tab system that was taken out of mail last month when Yahoo announced a number of significant upgrades. While the tab system worked well enough, the downside was more tabs would open as you did more in your inbox, making it difficult to multitask.

This week’s release offers a view of three sets of most recent activities. Click on recent view and it will display a list of messages you’re composing, recently opened emails and your latest search.

The problem is that many Yahoo users are unhappy, as a quick trawl of Twitter and related sites show.

Did no one at Yahoo consider the potential risks of releasing untried, untested and unwanted changes to its core product?"

But there is also a lot of sniping at Mayer, who has been entrusted with turning the fortunes of Yahoo around in the face of competition from the likes of Google and Microsoft. While she is currently cresting a wave around Wall Street, users are not enamored with many of her changes — including the new corporate logo, which was changed during the summer.

While many of Mayer's decisions have been necessary, she needs to consider Yahoo users or risk losing them. However, don't expect the whining on social networks to stop her.

Document Capture Is Still Big Business

Document capture, even with advances in enterprise collaboration technologies, remains one of staples of enterprise IT. In fact, according to new research from IT researchers Harvey Spencer Associates (HSA), the global market for capture grew by 8.2 percent in the past year.

Even with the financial problems of some of the bigger economies outside of the US, the market is now worth $2.7 billion, with on-demand solutions taking a 23 percent share of the overall market, a sure sign that the move from on-premises to cloud solutions is well underway.

Growth itself has declined slight, but capture has not suffered the way some other areas of IT have. The importance of records management and conversion of paper records into digital records appears to be sinking in.

That said, there has been a shift in the market over the past year, HSA reports, with records management now accounting for just one third of the Capture output.

After records management, the second largest area for document capture sales is in accounting, which primarily consists of processing invoices for accounts payables and processing remittance sheets for accounts receivable. This is followed in volume by case management.

Document capture has traditionally relied on high speed document scanners, which still account for more than 50 percent of inputs, but more than 20 percent of input is now from MFP’s — that is, multi-function peripherals like networked office digital copiers. The remainder is primarily from fax servers, email and mobile devices. The study is now in its ninth year, but only available to HSA clients.

Office 365’s New Markets

Some more news this week from Office 365, this time with the announcement that it has expanded its reach to 17 new markets and added four new languages.

According to Microsoft, this means it is available in 123 markets globally. Another 18 markets offer it as a 120 day trial, presumably to see if it has commercial potential. The new languages are Indonesian, Kazakh, Hindi, and Hebrew, bringing the number of Office 365 languages to 40.

While some of the markets are obscure, to say the least, and include places like St. Kitts and Nevis (Caribbean Islands with total populations of 51,134), the Palestinian Territories and even Monaco, the choice of markets does underline Microsoft’s strategy of making Office 365 a global suite.

dtSearch Enhances Search

Finally this week, enterprise search vendor dtSearch announced an upgrade to its enterprise search product tov7.73, which offers enhanced .NET, C++ and Java API options for dtSearch Engine developers. This will enable them embed document filters for data parsing, conversion, extraction and display of retrieved data with highlighted hits.

However, the real draw of this upgrade is availability of a new beta version of dtSearch Web with Spider. This offers HTML 5 template enhancements that simplify the publishing of searchable data onto the web. The new version is available now and comes with a bunch of other improvements that should offer users enhanced search results across the enterprise.

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